[TriLUG] lightweight linux distro/pc giveaway

[Magnus]

Jim Ray wrote:
> Go on and try Microsoft Vista for that type of machine :-)

When the Pentiums first came out, I had a Pentium 60MHz with 1GB hard 
disk.  It came with 16MB RAM which I upgraded to 32MB.  This would have 
been circa 1994.

Windows ran pretty well on it as a desktop OS but I had other things in 
mind.  I was running a semi-popular BBS in Philadelphia at the time and 
wanted this primarily to be a BBS box with secondary role as my desktop.

I installed desqview on it and it ran reasonably well.  Trying to stuff 
as much into high memory as possible was a challenge but eventually I 
had a few nodes of my BBS running in desqview sessions and no desktop 
functionality.  The multitasking in desqview wasn't smooth so while 
things ran quickly, each DOS session had bursts of activity.  Callers 
would experience this in the form of a couple of lines of text scrolling 
at a time with pauses in between.

So then I bit the bullet and bought OS/2 at the Electronics Boutique at 
the local mall.

Paydirt.

OS/2 ran fantastically on this box.  I ran a few phone lines for the BBS 
in DOS sessions in the background and had a fantastic GUI desktop 
running in the foreground.  Dialup internet wasn't hard at all to set 
up.  The web was more of a curiosity in its infant stages at this point 
so email and nntp news were more heavily used.  I managed to setup an 
nntp news feed for my BBS users, which made my BBS that much more 
popular.  I added a few more phone lines and the performance wasn't so 
flawless anymore.

So then I found out you could replace the Presentation Manager in OS/2 
with various other front end interfaces.  I picked one called "tshell" 
which was functionally a lot more like desqview.  It basically allowed 
me to set up a number of command line virtual consoles and run each node 
of the BBS in one (I was still running on Renegade software, which ran 
on a DOS emulation layer in OS/2).  So I lost my desktop but the BBS 
handled 8 phone lines plus my sysop console in a way that my users raved 
about.  They thought I had a dedicated pentium box for each phone line 
and couldn't believe it when I told them I indeed had all 8 lines 
running on one box.  There was also a trick some sysops used to do 
involving setting up a second computer as a games server with a serial 
connection to the bbs machine but I didn't have to do that.  It all ran 
on one box.

After I took down the BBS, that machine made for a fantastic OS/2 
desktop for several years before it got zapped in a storm.

I've had a number of other first generation Pentiums (and still do).  
Especially Pentium 100 and 133MHz machines with 16 or 32MB of memory.  
They are very useful as an indicator of just how porky Linux is 
getting.  Using Red Hat as a test distro, I think the point of no return 
was in the transition from Red Hat Linux 6.2 to 7.0 (well before Fedora 
Core).  That's just going from memory.  I'm pretty sure that's when RHL 
became fairly useless on old hardware.  As an interesting point of 
comparison, Windows 98 also runs pretty well on this hardware.

Even the most current version of OpenBSD runs great on these old 
machines.  It doesn't just limp along.  It is actually very usable and 
if you're a command line guy you might find you don't mind the old 
hardware much at all.

Remember, in 1994 a Pentium 90MHz was considered a top end workstation.  
These machines have not gotten any slower as they get older.  What has 
changed?  First and foremost, software has gotten porkier and porkier.  
Secondly, our expectations have changed.

Participation in the OLPC project will be good for Red Hat directly, and 
the Open Source community as a whole indirectly.  Porting Linux to this 
hardware is going to highlight so many of the inefficiencies that have 
crept into Linux over the years.

Interestingly I tried installing RHEL5 on a test machine to try it out.  
It had 256MB of memory.  Insane by 1994 standards.  OS/2 wouldn't know 
what to do with all that.  My biggest servers probably had that much in 
1994.  Today, RHEL5 installer calls that "low memory" and forces a text 
mode installation, and various other "low memory" compromises.  Does 
anyone else see something wrong with this picture?

Note, I'm not trying to single out Red Hat.  I use it on all of my 
production servers at work.  So I have my hands on it more often than 
other distributions.  I've seen similar problems with other major 
distributions.